Finishing the First Draft

I'm excited and a little let down. Finishing the first draft of a novel always leaves me with an incredible sense of accomplishment mixed with a sadness because I won't be putting my characters into any new quandries that they need to figure their way out of, or challenging them with roadblocks they must overcome to reach their goals. I just finished my middle grade novel, THE EX-CON AND THE SEA, about a twelve-year-old girl, Missy, whose poor school performance leaves her at the bottom of the sixth grade, and whose mother has been sentenced to three months in an alcohol treatment center for causing an accident resulting in injury. The only person her mother could find to watch over Missy and her six-year-old brother, Hayden, is their estranged fisherman father who has been out of prison for only a year and who has no experience raising children. It's hard enough to suddenly be living with a father she barely remembers, but the task is magnified for Missy as she tries to carve out a temporary existance for her and her brother in a small fishing community, struggle with her low self-esteem, study for her pending test, and manage her growing anger over her mother's drinking.

As the title suggests, there are some ties to Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, though the story itself is quite different. I loved writing it, and the let down comes when you have to say goodbye to your children's adventures, and finally write the words, THE END. But it's really not the end, because now I'm ready to delve into revisions, and submitting it to my critique group, and more revisions, and submitting it to agents, and hopefully more revisions before submitting to publishers, and hopefully more revisions after that. So silly as it sounds, I'm praying for lots of rounds of revisions before I finally say goodbye to Missy and Hayden.